A new, young cacher has recently shown up in Austin. I suspected this from his handle, but it was confirmed when I met him at one of his caches. To be honest, I have multiple feelings about his caches thus far. The first one was quite good, a small in a tree growing in the median of a residential neighborhood (I was FTF, by the way). The second cache, on the other hand, was a five-gallon bucket, low in a spindly tree at the edge of a park. It was nice to find a large in the middle of the city, but I seriously doubt that cache is long for the world. It will be too easily spotted by muggles. Yesterday, I went after the third cache he had placed, a 3-D printed bison tied to a grate with fishing wire. On one level, I’m not very impressed. As I have mentioned in the past, I am somewhat blasé about caches. On the other hand, he seems to be making some good strides toward hiding for someone with such a low count of finds. While the five-gallon bucket reinforces my belief that nobody should be allowed to make a hide until after they have found at least one hundred caches, the other two give me a little bit of hope. I know he’s not doing it entirely alone because he’s certainly not old enough to drive to all these places, but credit where credit is due. He is definitely giving it the old college try, which is impressive for someone who is more than likely in middle school. I wish him good luck and good hunting and hiding.
A couple of days before, I was going out to get my cache for the day and chose a relatively new trackable hotel for my quarry. I walked along the side of a stream, seeing two people with their backs to me, a man and a girl, by the fence line. I looked at the map, and the red line pointed toward both of them, registering about the same distance from me to them. I closed that distance and spoke out to them, lest I spook them. They turned out to be a father-daughter caching team. They never gave me their handles, but they were impressed that there must be a lot of cachers around to actually meet another one at a cache. We chatted for a few moments as I lent them a pen to sign the log, and then they quickly shot off to grab another cache down the creek side.
They are coming. New blood arrives, drip by drip, step by step. Let them come! We want more. We need their like.
Geocaching While Black 